Various enterprise software packages such as Axapta, Navision and Great Plains Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) applications are known. These applications combine financial management, customer relations management, supply chain management, human resource management or other database management applications in a single highly integrated enterprise application.
These enterprise software packages utilize a large number of stored database files (also called tables) that are part of a collection of historical information (also called a database) that is shared by the various management applications. These database files represent widely varying types of enterprise information and include data from transactions such as sales, purchase orders and bill payments, or reference tables such as currency exchange rates, employee records and customer profiles, as well as ledgers and other accounting tables. Data from a particular transaction is typically stored in multiple tables. Storing related information in multiple tables, rather than a single table, speeds up searches and enhances data integrity.
There are a large number of events in which users creates a new instance of a transaction in the course of conducting daily business activities. The user opens a data entry screen and enters new data into the data entry screen.
When the data entry screen or data table is initially displayed to the user, it is common practice for initial default values to be entered into some of the data fields after data is entered into a key field of the data entry screen. The default data represents historical data that is relatively stable. After data entry is complete, the completed new data entry is stored as an additional instance of a transaction in the database.
For example, when an order entry clerk enters a new order from a customer, after a customer number is entered in a key field, the data entry screen then displays default data such as billing address, shipping address, method of payment, method of shipment and other fixed historical data associated with the manually entered customer number.
These automatic displays of default data save time and help avoid data entry errors. In some fields associated with the key field, however, the default data is not automatically displayed because it is not a stable value, or is not completely determined based on the customer number. For example, a particular customer may not have a fixed shipping address, but may instead have multiple shipping addresses that depend on the name of the purchasing agent who is placing the order, the type of goods ordered and the season of the year. The default based only on a key field does not address this problem.
Manual data entry and manual data selection are time-consuming, costly and prone to errors. There is a desire to increase the efficiency and accuracy of new data entry by increasing the number of default entries for fields associated with the key field. However, the fact that data entered in the key field is not a complete basis for selecting a default value for these fields is a barrier to increasing the number of default entries.
A method is needed to ascertain and automatically enter default values for fields in which the default value depends on causes and conditions other than data entered in a key field.